The first comes courtesy of the American Political Science Association, who has named the book the Winner of the 2014 Victoria Schuck Award. This prize is awarded annually for the best book published on women and politics and carries a prize of $1,000. Initially established to honor the legacy of Victoria Schuck and her commitment to women and politics, the award recognizes and encourages research and publication by women in the field.

The second, awarded by the International Society of Political Psychology, has dubbed Brooks’s book the Winner of the 2014 David O. Sears Award. This prize is awarded to the best book published in the field of political psychology of mass politics, including political behavior, political values, political identities, and political movements, released during the previous calendar year. In keeping with the scholarship of David O. Sears, the award-winning work must “demonstrate the highest quality of thought and make a major substantive contribution to the field of political psychology.”

Deborah Jordan Brooks is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. She received her B.A. in both Politics and Psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and completed both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science at Yale University. From 1998 to 2003, Brooks also served as the Senior Research Director for the Gallup Organization, which “provides data-driven news based on U.S. and world polls, daily tracking, and public opinion research.”

The Migration and Citizenship Section of the American Political Science Association has named Martin Ruhs’s The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration the winner of the 2014 Best Book Award in the Migration and Citizenship category. The judging committee lauded Ruhs for his “innovative, rigorous, and very comprehensive treatment of the subject of international labor migration” saying additionally that his “command of knowledge and research skills demonstrates the best practices of scholarship.”

Shortlisted for the 2013 Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award

Each year the CESS Book Award and a monetary prize of $500 is presented to the author of the research monograph, published in the preceding two years, that represents the most important contribution to Central Eurasian studies, or that holds the greatest potential for furthering scholarship on the Central Eurasian region. Although Barnes’ book did not win, it was one of a “very strong shortlist of six books.”

Death and Redemption offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag– the Soviet Union’s vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons– in Soviet society. Soviet authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but unlike the Nazis they did not conceive of their concentration camps as instruments of genocide. In this provocative book, Steven Barnes argues that the Gulag must be understood primarily as a penal institution where prisoners were given one final chance to reintegrate into Soviet society. Millions whom authorities deemed “reeducated” through brutal forced labor were allowed to leave. Millions more who “failed” never got out alive.

Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Kazakhstan as well as memoirs by actual prisoners, Barnes shows how the Gulag was integral to the Soviet goal of building a utopian socialist society. He takes readers into the Gulag itself, focusing on one outpost of the Gulag system in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, a location that featured the full panoply of Soviet detention institutions. Barnes traces the Gulag experience from its beginnings after the 1917 Russian Revolution to its decline following the 1953 death of Stalin.

Death and Redemption reveals how the Gulag defined the border between those who would reenter Soviet society and those who would be excluded through death.

Steven A. Barnes is associate professor of history and director of the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Mason University.

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